In 1900 she married Nagib. Anton Shami liked the elegant, well-connected young man, and hoped that he would help him to expand his business. But Nagib didn’t want to work with his father-in-law, or his own father either. First he took a post with a money-changer, and later, after two years of training in Paris, he became technical director of the quality and control department of the Banque de Syrie et du Liban, which as a central bank was allowed to print lira notes. The notes came with an imprint stating that the French government guaranteed the value of the Syrian and Lebanese lira to a maximum of twenty French francs.
In 1910, cholera carried off Anton Shami and his wife. Lucia survived because she and her husband happened to be visiting her family in Venice that summer. She inherited a large fortune which Nagib invested securely with the bank.
His wife was intent on having a large family, and she duly bore ten children, but eight of them died just after their birth. Only Marcel, and two years later Claire, lived.
Until her mid-fifties, Lucia habitually had affairs with young men. Later, her daughter often laughed to think how as a girl she had innocently believed that all her mother’s visiting lovers were family members, and called them Uncle, until one day a girlfriend explained it to her. Claire was seventeen by then, and her mother had long since given up the young men.
When her friend enlightened her in the spring of 1935 Claire felt furious, not because of her mother’s escapades in themselves but because of the lies and derision to which she had exposed Claire, her own daughter. But she felt truly humiliated and isolated only when she tackled her brother on the subject. He was nineteen, and had been studying law since the beginning of the year. He unfeelingly told her to her face that he had known about it all along, and was glad to see his mother find the love their father couldn’t give her.
“But what about me? Why didn’t any of you tell me?” asked Claire, close to tears.
“You take after Father, you’re as sentimental as he is. You can’t accept hard facts,” he claimed.
From that moment on her love for her mother and her brother died. She wouldn’t give them away, all the same, although when she went into Damascus with her father a week later to eat an ice she broached the subjects of love, faithfulness, and jealousy. She said she’d like to hear his opinion so that she would know more about the way to behave with her fiancé Musa.
Nagib looked askance at his daughter and smiled. “Why does love always have to imply possession?” he asked, shaking his head. Then he fell silent for a while, as if wondering what he should tell her. Claire gave him time. “You should love with composure,” he said. “Love should bestow sublimity. It lets you give everything without losing anything. That’s its magic. But here people want a contract of marriage concluded in the presence of witnesses. Imagine, witnesses, as if it were some kind of crime,” he repeated slowly, allowing her to appreciate the ridiculous aspect. “State and Church supervise the contract. That’s not love, it’s orders from a higher authority to increase and multiply.”
He smiled at his own words. “And any idiot who can’t even add up one and one to make two knows, when he loves someone, that he wants to possess that person body as well as soul. He guards his property jealously to ensure that neither heart nor brain, neither liver nor stomach, nor …” Nagib hesitated for a moment. “Well, you know what I mean,” he added, “…will be touched by any other thought, hand or feeling. Jealousy and unhappiness are programmed into the arrangement in advance.”
They sat there quietly, and Claire looked at her father as he spooned up his ice, smiling. What a wise man, she thought. He seemed to her like a visitor from a strange world that was now at peace.
She didn’t feel like that; it did matter to her when women gazed adoringly at their fiancés or indulged in vulgar behaviour with them.
A week after this conversation in the ice cream parlour, her father was arrested. He was accused of embezzling large sums of money from the bank where he had worked for five years, and he spent three years in prison, until the Catholic Patriarch successfully intervened on his behalf. But he was never exonerated, even by his own wife. However, that was a matter of indifference to Nagib.
52. Tamam and Sarkis
The large house stood on the village square, opposite the gate of St. Giorgios’s churchyard. Lucia had the second floor entirely renovated, equipped with the most modern technological devices, and furnished in the latest fashion. The rent was so cheap that she paid it for a whole year in advance, so that she could visit Mala any time she liked.
Tamam, who owned the house, liked her tenants from Damascus because she enjoyed talking to Lucia. She never exchanged a word with the other villagers. She had a large vegetable garden and several vineyards, and bought the rest of her provisions in the neighbouring village of Ainyose, bringing them home on the back of her donkey. So whenever Lucia came to Mala she brought an extra case full of the finest foodstuffs, including chocolate and canned meat. Nothing could have given Tamam greater pleasure.
At the time Claire, like all girls in love, was reading love stories non-stop, especially French novels, but their landlady’s own love story cast all those books into the shade.
Tamam was a strange woman. She lived alone with her son Djamil. The villagers thought her eccentric, and people whispered that she was to blame for her husband’s early death. She had loved him from her childhood. He and his parents lived in a little house near her family’s large property. Her father was a prosperous farmer then. She wasn’t beautiful, but several men proposed to her. She turned them down, and her father was glad that she stayed with him when his wife died, and he didn’t have to share her with any other man. But when he discovered that she was in love with his neighbours’ son, he forbade her to have anything to do with the young man, who barely scraped a living by working in the stone quarry. Tamam loved her father, and was torn between her feelings for him and for her lover. Night after night she wept with longing for Sarkis, who had sworn not to touch any other woman. He suggested elopement, but Tamam didn’t want to expose her lonely father to the mockery of the villagers. She hoped that death would bring him release, but death took its time.
The couple waited for twenty years. When Tamam’s father did die, Sarkis was forty and she was in her late thirties. They waited another year, until Tamam could put her black mourning clothes aside. Until that day Mala had never known a tale of self-sacrificing lovers with a happy ending. Such stories always ended in tragedy; you couldn’t reconcile the harsh peasant life with the tenderness of great love affairs out of fairy tales, set in lush gardens where people wore flowing silken robes, probably because those tales made life in the bleak mountains seem even less bearable.
Tamam was afraid of the wedding night. Her neighbour, an experienced midwife, told her horror stories of the first night when the bride wasn’t in her first youth and had a hymen harder than leather. Husbands, she said, quite often needed her, the midwife, to help by sticking her forefinger through it.
Relishing the bride’s fears, the woman told her about one man in the village who had fractured his prick when he deflowered his bride. It had a right-angled bend in it ever after. Another husband, she said, thrust in with all his might, but because his bride was thirty-five her maidenhead resisted, bouncing back like a trampoline, and he fell out of bed and hit the back of his head on the floor. The blow left the man’s mind confused. He spoke nothing but Spanish thereafter, and he avoided all women.